Endless Love (52 page)

Do you remember the night we went out to dinner after I spent the day with Susan Henry? I told you about what she said, how I used you to act out all the aggressions I had toward my family. Now with Hugh gone and knowing you lured him into the traffic as he walked around Fifth Avenue with his new girl, I can’t help thinking: in a way I would have wanted to do that, too. It’s very hard sometimes for me not to think of myself as the worst kind of monster. It makes it difficult for me to get close to anyone. Only Keith, because he accepts anything and everything about me. Sometimes I can be in the middle of doing something and I’ll have an image of you being dragged off that morning by the police and I’ll think it should have been
me.
Just as I was a part of you when we made love, I was a part of you when you caused my family so much harm. When we made love we seduced each other, but when it came time to strike out at my family, I’m afraid it was I who seduced you. I don’t want to hurt you or confuse you by saying this. But maybe knowing my feelings will help you locate your own and maybe that will help you go back into the world again, where I sincerely believe you belong.

I know we will probably never see each other again. I look at loving you as living outside the law and I never want to do that again. I’ve lost a part of my nerve and it’s just as well because that kind of recklessness only leaves room for itself. Everything else is blown away. We could never have a life. It seems so strange to tell you, but I still believe in our love and still love you. Yet I’ve put it aside, truly and forever, and will never see you again.

I had no more mail from Jade for the next year. I didn’t write back to her, save for a pictureless postcard thanking her for writing to me. I didn’t write to Ann and I did my best not to think of any of them, which meant I tried not to think of them all day long. The only visitors I received were Arthur and Rose, but they no longer came as regularly as before. As I felt their visits becoming more infrequent, I asked them only to come once a month, and that made everything a lot easier for all of us.

I remained on Lithium, there was no talk of making me an outpatient, but my progress was good. Sometimes I thought I had merely adjusted to my situation, become so familiar with the longing and disorientation that I didn’t notice it in the same way. Other times I was absolutely sure I was getting better. But, if someone were to have asked me what that meant—my getting better—I don’t know what I could have answered. My goals were very modest: I wanted to get through the days without the crunch of emotion. In a strange and gradual way, I was adjusting to the life of a madman.

And then one day what was left of the bottom dropped out. It was February 1, 1976, and my parents had braved a blizzard to come out for their visit. Arthur wore a black Russian fur hat and when he took it off and shook out the snow, I saw he had lost nearly all of the hair in the center of his skull and the long hair on the sides had turned dull silver: he looked nicely distinguished, like a delegate at an international conference of trade unionists. He had lost bulk; his cheekbones showed now and though he wore his plaid wool shirt buttoned at the top, it hung loosely around his throat. Rose looked positively ravishing. The cold had painted her cheeks a dark raspy pink and the nervousness of the day enlarged her eyes. She wore fashionable leather boots, a gray skirt, and a turtleneck sweater; she smoked a cigarette in an Aqua-filter and exhaled the smoke in a long smooth upward stream that pierced the sunlight like a spear.

“I bet you thought we wouldn’t make it,” said Arthur, embracing me.

Rose stood at the window, looking out at the weather, probably wondering if the storm would perversely institutionalize her for the night. Now, when one of my parents spoke, the other looked away and gave no evidence of listening, the way people do when a foreign language is being spoken.

“You know what I was thinking about today?” I began, when we’d settled in. “My first day at Hyde Park High. You guys took me shopping at Polk Brothers a week before and I insisted on buying a pair of red pants. They were sort of like jeans, but not really. Like khaki, but red. No one wore red trousers; I’d never even seen a pair. I thought you were both being very easygoing, letting me buy them. And when I chose them to wear for my first day at school neither of you said a word—I remember I was a little worried, thinking you might stop me. But God, did I suffer for wearing them.” I laughed; Rose and Arthur looked uneasy, like two claustrophobes in an elevator. They’d come to speak of other things and I’m sure they thought it wasn’t a Good Sign that I was talking about my first day in high school. “I was stuck with a reputation. I was the boy with the red pants for the entire year, though I never wore those fucking pants again. And I was thinking today how a little thing like that can temper your whole life, how it can tilt the way people see you and how that influences the way you see yourself, how it circumscribes the arc of your behavior. It’s amazing you let me go to school with those pants on. Maybe you thought it was something boys my age commonly wore? Was that it?” I looked at Rose.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t remember what you
wore
on your first day of high school.”

“Well, I do,” I said, with a small, defeated grin. “Red pants. Redder than any apple. Much, much redder than blood.”

“We have some news about Jade Butterfield,” Rose said.

“What is it?” I said. My anxiety was instant and total. I sat with my legs a few inches apart, my hands on my knees, leaning forward. I heard the wind and, from somewhere, a radio: it was the Kinks singing “Lola.”

“You have to realize it’s for the best, though I’m sure you do,” said Arthur. Had he thought my mother had already told me, or did he want to skip over the announcement and go straight to the consolation?

“What’s happened to her?” I said. I’d never felt so insubstantial; only words separated me from immeasurable sorrow. She’s been in an accident. She’s dying. She’s dead. It would end my life.

“Nothing’s happened to her,” said Rose. “Except that she’s found herself a husband.”

“We got an announcement in the mail,” Arthur said. “I don’t know who sent it. It wasn’t signed.”

“Do you have it? Give it to me.”

“I forgot it,” said Rose. “It doesn’t say anything. She’s marrying a Frenchman. We couldn’t decide if he was French or American.”

“Where is it?”

“I told you. We didn’t bring it. It was just a very simple card. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cheaper-looking wedding announcement in my whole life. Not that nice old-fashioned fancy print most people use.”

I felt the beginnings of relief that nothing had happened to Jade but the comfort was devastated as soon as it appeared.

Rose was continuing: “All it said was Mr. and Mrs. Denis Edelman blah blah blah the marriage of their son François to Jade Butterfield. Then the name of some synagogue in Paris, France.”

“When?”

“A month ago,” said Arthur. “On January fourth.”

“And you’ve known?”

“We just got the card a few days ago,” Arthur said.

“I don’t even know who sent it,” Rose said. “But I thought you should know anyhow.”

I stood up. Even the slight motion made the room race. I faced my parents; my father sat very still, absolutely erect; my mother was tapping her foot and glancing at it. I wanted to throw myself before them, to create a miraculous moment of family and comfort. I felt very weak and very ugly.

“Help me,” I said, bowing my head. I felt my knees going weak and I wanted to fall, but I wouldn’t.

“Help you?” said Rose. “I don’t understand, David. I just don’t get it. What can I do?” She looked at Arthur, her eyes at once frightened and annoyed.

“What’s past is past,” Arthur said, in a murmur. “There’s no turning back. Forgive me for this, David, but I only hope she’s happy.”

“What can I do to help you?” Rose said. “I ask you. I’ve never known. Just tell me. You ask me for help and I don’t know what to do. You’re talking about red pants from twelve years ago, you’re white as a sheet, and I don’t know what to do for you anymore, if I ever did, to be perfectly honest.”

I was sorry I’d said it. I drew myself up and tried to look masterly. It cleared my mind to take a long, deep breath. I walked to the window. I saw a boy named Howard Kerr, dressed in his unvarying black, walking with his parents toward their car in the visitors’ parking lot. The Kerrs walked with their arms around each other while Howard walked in front, his head down, jacketless and hugging himself, his long hair dancing.

“It is for the best,” I said. I watched the Kerrs getting into their LTD. Howard brushed the snow off their windshield with his forearm. “I mean it’s a relief. Otherwise, there’d probably always be a question. I feel a weight being lifted off of me, I already feel it.” I listened to my parents breathing behind me; my legs were aching from the tightness of my muscles. Mr. Kerr rolled his window down and Howard stepped back, bent at the knee to speak. The exhaust from the car darkened the snow to pale ash. Mrs. Kerr’s long red fingernails appeared at the open window, waving goodbye. The car pulled away and Howard stood and watched as the taillights disappeared into the haze of the storm.

“You’d better be going,” I said to my parents. It was dark enough outside to see their reflections in the window, propped up in their chairs like two oddly angled playing cards. “People are already leaving and you’ve got a long drive. In this snow. It’s not letting up, you know.” I saw Arthur beginning to stir; his hands went onto the arms of his chair and he took a deep breath; soon, he’d be at my side, his arms around me. I turned quickly, stopping him. “The best thing, the best possible thing, for right now I mean, it’s kind of strange right now, a little hard to adjust to, so I think you should both leave.”

“We could talk, David,” said Arthur.

I nodded. “I know. But I’ve been talking for about five years and it hasn’t…I’m a little talked out, is what I mean. Maybe we can talk some other time.”

Rose and Arthur left with very little additional protest. I stood at the window and watched them walk to the parking lot; they didn’t touch but they seemed to be talking. As he opened the car door, Arthur turned around and waved in the general direction of my window, but I stepped back, plastered myself to the wall, as if avoiding gunfire. I sat in one of the armchairs, wondering with an empty, obsessive repetitiveness if there was any significance in the fact that I’d chosen to sit in Rose’s chair and not Arthur’s. The volume of the radio someone was playing seemed to have increased and the sound of it climbed up my spine like a monkey.

I stood up, my fists clenched, and I strode out into the corridors. The doors to some of the rooms were open. Families visiting. It was important to remember the whole world wasn’t in a hospital, didn’t meet in tiny rooms with single beds, on Sunday. Finally, I found the radio, on the floor above my own. It was in Bruno Tesi’s room. He held it on his lap, a huge portable with the antennae completely extended and quivering. Bruno was with his older brother, who sat in a trenchcoat with his long legs crossed, smoking a brown cigarette. Bruno, soft and unformed, with skin like flan, smiled when I came into the room. A Steve Miller record was on, monotonous and snide. Bruno turned the volume down because even he knew I’d have to shout to be heard over it. I said in a voice only loud enough to be heard: “If you don’t turn that thing down and keep it soft I’m going to cause you excruciating pain and then I’m going to kill you.”

It was a grave error threatening Bruno. Both he and his brother reported it and my actions came under closer scrutiny. My favored position at Rockville withdrew just as effortlessly as it had appeared, backing out of circumstance’s door, hat in hand.

It was just as well, I felt. My will was largely gone and I felt myself sinking into the marsh of my worst self. I had one last rational thought before letting it all slip out of my hands: perhaps Jade had moved to Paris to increase my chances of release.

The loosely guarded secret of Rockville was that the staff tolerated sexual contact between the patients. It was usually discreet, so much so that in all my years inside I knew only of two or three instances when two people were known as a couple. During my first stay, Dr. Clark told me that if I ever had a romantic encounter with a patient the important thing was that I should not be ashamed of it, that I would speak to him of it, “share it.” This was the Rockville strategy on sex: rather than control it, they wanted to make it a part of the general rehabilitative atmosphere. We were all of us there, after all, to help one another, and this meant genuine human contact—and how could there be genuine human contact with sexuality strictly off- limits?

In April, a couple months after learning of Jade’s marriage, I made friends with a sixteen-year-old patient named Rochelle Davis. Rochelle was quite beautiful in a sultry, unwholesome way. She wore prune-colored lipstick and nail polish, black clothes, smoked Camels incessantly, and presented herself as an authority on suicide. She had categories of suicide: revenge suicide, accidental suicide, instructional suicide, and others that made even less immediate sense, such as lavender suicide, cheesy suicide, and astral suicide. She had no friends, neither inside the hospital nor out. In the world she was too aggressively strange, and in Rockville most felt too vulnerable to risk friendship with someone so fascinated by self-termination. Rochelle—gaunt, green-eyed, her chestnut hair combed Elvis style—gave no evidence of caring what people thought of her, but she did seem very keen on knowing me. It was obvious that my increasingly unstable social position in the hospital was a large part of Rochelle’s interest in me, but it wasn’t that simple, as it never is.

The first time we made love was in the bathroom on the first floor reserved for nurses. It was a strange, fussy little room, with pink walls, dull tile floor, an armchair, and a dressing table holding Johnson’s Baby Powder, dental floss, Arrid deodorant spray, and a spray cologne called “Sunday.” We made love in the armchair, three or four times over—not out of an ever- increasing passion but because each time it was clumsy and the satisfaction we gained only irritated our huge store of static lust. At first, we didn’t have the boldness to take our clothes off—as if it might somehow be better to be discovered with pants down to the knees rather than naked altogether. We made love with Rochelle on my lap, her bony, bluish feet pressed on the back of the chair, her head dangling between my open legs, her navy blue underwear quivering like a trampoline between her thighs as she shook her constricted legs with nervous, discomforted passion. Then we helped each other come with our mouths and then we made love on the cold floor—naked now, but it was too late: we were already growing incurious and it was clear that the yearning we attempted to serve would remain immune to our efforts.